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Tuesday, May 3, 2016

North Korea Poses EMP Threat - Daniel John Sobieski

by Daniel John Sobieski

Senior Russian generals warned EMP Commissioners in
2004 that their EMP nuclear warhead design leaked “accidentally” to
North Korea, and unemployed Russian scientists found work in North
Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

The
nightmare scenario of an America sent back centuries in time before
electricity, refrigeration, and smart phones has grown unnervingly
closer with the presence of two North Korean satellites with orbits over
a blissfully unaware American populace and an Obama administration
indifferent to the apocalyptic threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP)
attack.

On Feb. 7, North Korea launched a second satellite, the KMS-4, to join their KMS-3 satellite launched in December of 2012. In an article in the Washington Times
on April 24, R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central
Intelligence Agency, and Peter Vincent Fry, executive director of the
Task Force on National and Homeland Security as well as director of the
Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, warned of
the dangers of an apocalyptic EMP attack that these and similar
satellites pose:

Both
satellites now are in south polar orbits, evading many U.S. missile
defense radars and flying over the United States from the south, where
our defenses are limited. Both satellites -- if nuclear armed -- could
make an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that could blackout the U.S.
electric grid for months or years, thereby killing millions.Technologically,
such an EMP attack is easy -- since the weapon detonates at
high-altitude, in space, no shock absorbers, heat shield, or vehicle for
atmospheric re-entry is necessary. Since the radius of the EMP is
enormous, thousands of kilometers, accuracy matters little. Almost any
nuclear weapon will do.Moreover,
North Korea probably has nuclear weapons specially designed, not to
make a big explosion, but to emit lots of gamma rays to generate
high-frequency EMP. Senior Russian generals warned EMP Commissioners in
2004 that their EMP nuclear warhead design leaked “accidentally” to
North Korea, and unemployed Russian scientists found work in North
Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Woolsey
and Pry, along with former Reagan science adviser William R. Graham,
chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission, Ambassador Henry Cooper,
director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and chief negotiator at the
Defense and Space Talks with the USSR; and Fritz Ermarth, chairman of
the National Intelligence Council; warned of the North Korean EMP threat
an article in the February 12 issue of National Review:

Naïve reliance on their transparent disavowals could end up costing millions of American lives.North
Korea launched its second satellite on Saturday, yet the national press
continues to ignore this existential threat. The White House has not
recognized that a nuclear-armed North Korea has demonstrated an ability
to kill most Americans with an electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) attack. And
White House spokesmen and the media have misled the public with
unjustified assurances that North Korea has not yet miniaturized nuclear
warheads for missile or satellite delivery.We,
who have spent our professional lifetimes analyzing and defending
against nuclear-missile threats, warned years ago that North Korea’s
Unha-3 space launch vehicle could carry a small nuclear warhead and
detonate it a hundred or so miles over the United States to create an
EMP, leading to a protracted nationwide blackout. The resulting societal
chaos could kill millions.

The
image of an America gone dark, an America suddenly transported from an
era of IPads to an era of horse and buggy travel, recently depicted in
the NBC series “Revolution” is not science fiction but a very real
possibility. As Investor’s Business Daily described the threat in an aptly titled April, 2013 editorial, “How North Korea Could Destroy The United States”:

The
three-stage missile North Korea launched last December that also
orbited a “package,” which experts say could be a test to orbit a
nuclear weapon that then would be de-orbited on command anywhere over
the U.S. and exploded at a high altitude, releasing an electromagnetic
pulse (EMP). That would fry electronic circuitry and the nation’s power
grid.This
concern recently has been reinforced by a little-publicized study
released in May 2011, titled “In the Dark: Military Planning for a
Catastrophic Critical Infrastructure Event,” by the U.S. Army War
College that said a nuclear detonation at altitude above a U.S. city
could wipe out the electrical grid for hundreds, possibly thousands, of
miles around.The
satellite launched by Pyongyang coincided with a third round of nuclear
tests described as a “nuclear test of a higher level,” most likely
referring to a device made from highly enriched uranium, which is easier
to miniaturize than the plutonium bombs North Korea tested in 2006 and
2009, said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the private Sejong
Institute in South Korea…Any
nuclear weapon detonated above an altitude of 30 kilometers will
generate an electromagnetic pulse that will destroy electronics and
could collapse the electric power grid and other critical
infrastructures — communications, transportation, banking and finance,
food and water — that sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300
million Americans…Nobody
is harmed or killed immediately by the blast. But life in the U.S., the
world’s only superpower and the world’s largest economy, would come to a
screeching halt as a country dependent on cutting-edge 21st century
technology regresses in time almost a century instantaneously.

“One
of the things that we have been doing is spending a lot more time
positioning our missile development systems, so that even as we try to
resolve the underlying problem of nuclear development inside of North
Korea, we’re also setting up a shield that can at least block the
relatively low-level threats that they’re posing now,” President Obama
said in a CBS News interview on Tuesday.

First,
they are not missile “development” systems. They are missile defense
systems, systems which President Obama has long opposed as “Cold War”
weapons. Soon after taking office, President Obama scuttled plans for
ground-based missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech
Republic.

Second,
the North Korean threat, as posed by its nuclear weapons and its
satellite-launch capability is definitely not “low-level”. It is in fact
existential and even if President Obama deployed THAAD to the Korean
peninsula, the apocalyptic threat of an EMP attack by Pyongyang may
already, or could be very soon, over our heads.

President
Obama either does not understand the EMP threat, or has dismissed it.
It would be wise to elect a President in 2016 who both understands the
threat and is willing to deal with it, or this election may be the last
one the United States as we know it ever has.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared inInvestor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications. Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/north_korea_poses_emp_threat.html Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.